Portland's hard-core job market a tough road to walk

Nathan Walker, 33, moved to Portland from Seattle with 12 years of restaurant experience when he started job searching. He had waited tables, cooked, made lattes, tended bar and even owned his own lunch cafe. He also has a Bachelor of Arts in economics, summa cum laude.

He thought his odds were pretty good, but three months passed while he walked into every establishment in his close-in Southeast Portland neighborhood and sent out résumés in response to Craigslist ads. He and found himself with nary an interview. With his bank account dwindling, he finally got a call back for a position as a breakfast cook at a Pearl District restaurant. But it came with a catch.

"They told me they had it narrowed down between me and two other applicants, and that over the next seven days they would have each of us work two (unpaid) morning shifts to determine which candidate they were going to hire," Walker said. "I said 'yes' at first. And then the morning of (the first shift) I called and said, 'No, absolutely not.' I just felt it was too demeaning."

View full sizeREBECCA LERNER/SPECIAL TO THE OREGONIANStar Bar owner Josh Davis tends bar at his Southeast Morrison Street establishment. He says he recently posted an online ad for staff and got 600 e-mails within 24 hours, or about 150 for each position he mentioned.

Common experience

Walker's is not an unusual story in Portland, a city notoriously stuffed with highly educated, qualified job seekers. But restaurant owners say the past six months have brought a marked deluge of candidates, more than ever before. The result? Employers are becoming increasingly selective.

When Star Bar owner Josh Davis recently posted an online ad seeking staff for his new rock 'n' roll bar on Southeast Morrison Street, he got 600 e-mails within 24 hours, or about 150 for each position he mentioned.

"I'd never seen that many responses before, in all of my life," Davis said. He hired 12. "I feel like I got the cream of the crop."

And when Vita Cafe owner Aaron Woo posted an online ad to hire a dishwasher for his vegetarian restaurant on Northeast Alberta Street recently, he got 80 responses in the first two hours.

"I was getting two résumés for every one I was reading. I was actually considering pulling the ad," Woo said. "A year or two ago, I'd post and probably get a dozen responses in that same period of time. It's hard-core right now.

"If you were to compare this year's applicants, both in quality and quantity, to three or four years ago, it would be like night and day," Woo added. "You wouldn't even recognize that it was the same restaurant."

College grads

Eighty percent of Vita applicants have college degrees, and to see former managers applying for entry-level dishwashing positions is not uncommon, Woo said.

At local chain Hot Lips Pizza, company chef and hiring manager Greene Lawson said dishwasher candidates often "have 15 years of progressive experience in another field, like software engineer or construction."

But they're not the obvious choice, he said.

"We want somebody who's already done it, knows what they're getting into, who has held the position for a year," he said.

At Paragon, the oldest restaurant in the Pearl, general manager Bryan Westacott favors walk-in applicants. The comfort-food brasserie gets four to six job seekers a day dropping off résumés lately, Westacott said, up from one or two a day last year. And 70 percent have college degrees.

Candidates might do well to venture farther out. At Heidi's of Gresham, assistant manager Dennis Loewen estimated the popular eatery has seen only a 25 percent increase in applications from last year and said colleagues at other local establishments report the same. He said Heidi's still considers hiring people with no experience for entry-level positions, such as hostess.

"Take anyone"

"If we have a situation where we really need someone right away, we'll take just about anyone," he said.

A month after rejecting the unpaid cooking audition, Walker posted his own ad on Craigslist featuring his résumé and got a job within three days. He was hired as a barista for minimum wage in a slow Sellwood coffee shop.

"It was really depressing to send out your résumé to a job you think you're a shoo-in for and never get a call back," Walker said. "Or to hand your résumé to a restaurant manager who says, 'Oh, we'll put this with the others,' and see him pull out a folder with 200. But I eventually found work. There are jobs; it's just really tough."